Pursue your dreams!

Paul Potts, a cell-phone salesman who dreamed of spending his life “doing what I feel I was born to do.”

WARNING: This video may cause goose bumps and even tears. Watch at your own risk…and then get your dream out…polish it off….and put it back on the mantle so you see it every day.

If Paul can do it, so can you!

String Beans and Fruit

I had a discussion with my nephew last week about vegetables. We talked about their health benefits and in doing so I mentioned string beans. My nephew stopped me and said I can’t count string beans as a vegetable because they were a fruit just like the tomato. I said that is ridiculous, everyone knows that string beans are vegetables and to prove my point I began to poll the people sitting around us in the restaurant. EVERYONE agreed with me. Of course I got the wobbly head syndrome and said, “There you go smarty-pants what do you have to say to that?” His reply was “Well, everyone is wrong.” This debate went on for the entire meal and person after person agreed with me that it was simply ridiculous to think that string beans were fruits and not vegetables. This leads me to today’s Blog.

One reason we have disagreements with people is because in our minds we create this mold that we think all people must fit into and if they do not fit into this mold we say something is wrong with them. We have this preconceived notion of the way people should talk, dress and act and we have standards we put in place that we measure them by. If people do not measure up to our standards, we often critique them in a negative way. If they don’t do something the way we would we get upset. If they dress different or cut their hair different we say they are weird and if they are not as good at something as us we elevate ourselves and in the process we lower them. We even classify them based on the job they have or the type of house they live in. This should not be folks. Who are we to create a mold for a person and then expect them to fit into our mold? Shouldn’t we first realize that God created them and He is the one who should set the standard? We should accept people as they are, love them and help them become what God wants them to be, not what we want them to be. If we spent more time loving people as they are, understanding that is how God made them and spend less time trying to squish them into our self-made mold we won’t get upset near as often. Me? I tried to fit something as simple as a bean into a mold I made and even though I had everyone agree with me, everyone including myself was wrong.

String beans are fruits. Love people just the way they are, eat your greens and then…. Have a wonderful week!

Racism is Ignorance at its Highest

I recently saw a documentary about a group of young white men who were brain washed into believing that whites were superior to blacks or Jews. They promoted their views through public demonstrations, the media and one of the countries most racist organizations, the KKK. Now if these young men were graduates of Harvard or Yale and in the top 5% of the countries smartest people I might respect their opinion a little more . However, they idolized Hitler, lived in a shack in the woods, slept on the floor and admitted that their sleeping quarters were cold, damp and smelled. And they thought they were more advanced? (Here's your sign!)

Let's use a little intelligence when looking at racism, especially when it comes to skin color. Does the color of someone's skin have anything to do with the real reasons people are against a particular race? Has that skin broken the law, has it dealt drugs or suppressed people? Of course not, you can find black people who have sold their own into slavery, white people who do drugs and abuse the welfare system. You can find Asians who steal, Mexicans who abuse their wives and children, Italians who commit murder and Irishmen who rape women. You can find Jews hooked on crack cocaine, Christians hooked on ecstasy, Mormons hooked on heroin, and Jehovah's Witnesses who are alcoholics. You can find Southerners who won't work, Northerners who sell their Food-Stamps for drugs, Easterners who are dead beat dads and Westerners who are prostitutes, and do you know what else? You can take every problem we have on earth and you will find that every race, nationality, religion or gender has someone involved in causing those problems. So before you support racism and start blaming one particular group of people for the world's problems, you had better look in the mirror and ask yourself, what about the group you are in?

I do not agree with racism but I do discriminate. I discriminate against anyone who abuses the welfare system. I am against dead beat dads and anyone who deals drugs, rapes or abuses women and children. I am against anyone who steals, lies, cheats or takes advantage of another human being. I'm against evil in any form that is performed by any individual or any group of individuals, regardless of the color of their skin, where they grew up, their religion, their financial status, their hair color or even their sexual preference; and I will do my best to keep those who commit such deeds away from myself, my family and anyone else I feel they will hurt or influence. Oh yeah! I discriminate against one more thing; people who support racism.

Instead of being ignorant and joining the racists, why not put your time, money and efforts into real problems. Why don't you picket dead beat dads or march against those who abuse the welfare system? Why don't you form an alliance against lazy people who will not work or against those who just want to suck the tax payers dry of their hard earned income? Why are you not out educating young girls to keep their legs closed and young boys to keep their pants on so we don't have so many babies having babies? Why don't you volunteer at the boys club, the church youth groups or the homeless shelters to help turn people around and why don't you sit down with men who bail on their families and help them stick it out? In other words, why don't you do something that actually makes a difference in society?

People who honestly think that all our problems will go away if we were suddenly all one race have a problem themselves, its called being narrow minded. Focusing on racism will not help the problems we have, however focusing on the problems will. People need to stop beating a dead horse and bury it already because it really stinks and besides that, there are so many other things we need to be doing with our time and resources to make this world a better place.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it!